In this paper, the main purpose is to study existence of the global attractor for the weakly damped wave equation with gradient type nonlinearity. To this end, we first verify the existence and uniqueness of global weak solution by the Galerkin method and compulsively variational method. Furthermore, we obtained the global strong solution under some mild assumptions on f. Secondly, we utilize the $$\omega$$
ω
-limit compactness to show the semigroup generated by the equation has a compact, connected and invariant attractor.